An Autonomous System (AS) is a network or group of networks under common administration and with common routing policies. A typical example of an AS is a network administered and maintained by an Internet Service Provider (ISP). Customer networks, such as universities or corporations, connect to the ISP, and the ISP routes the network traffic originating from the customer networks to network destinations that may be in the same ISP or may be reachable only through other ISPs.
To facilitate the routing of network traffic through one or more ASes, the network elements of the ASes exchange routing information to various network destinations. Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is an exterior gateway protocol (EGP) that is used to exchange routing information among network elements (e.g., routers) in the same or different ASes. A computer host that executes a BGP process is typically referred to as a BGP host or a BGP device. To exchange BGP routing information, two BGP hosts, or peers, first establish a transport protocol connection with one another. Initially, the BGP peers exchange messages to open a BGP session, and, after the BGP session is open, the BGP peers exchange their entire routing information. Thereafter, only updates or changes to the routing information are exchanged, or advertised, between the BGP peers. The exchanged routing information is maintained by the BGP peers during the existence of the BGP session.